by Barbara Lightner
The beaten path goes funny bone.
Deep pain’s in the clutch of self-help.
The self-appointed guru and monger.
Curses to the broken and bottled anoint.
Baby carriages careen bomb-cratered streets.
Fires in the night materialize ghosts.
The scree of the banshee shrills through the air.
Never mind it’s all in the wealth of our nation
we toast over pig at the great barbecue,
the uninvited, arrested; the starved, skinned and boned;
the bloat-hearts assuaged; the rest admonished to laugh
midst tales of self-help.
And the sun in its daily rounds goes on.
And the moon looks on us all, all alike.
Barbara Lightner is a 70-year old shameless agitator, retired. After a career of community organizing and teaching at university, she turned her hand to poetry. As a bookshop owner, she sponsored poetry readings, and published chapbooks of local poets in Milwaukee, WI. Her poetry has appeared in the Table Rock Review and Poesia; as well as in Letters to the World, an anthology of women’s poetry.
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